I can without a doubt say that Blender is my number one favorite piece of software I’ve ever used! The speed of development is breakneck now, but the program still runs solid and stable, and the community around the program is excellent, too!

Amen to that! In another life, SoftImage 3D was my favorite tool. Then Microsoft bought it. Then Autodesk, the software graveyard tar pit, bought it and petrified it for all eternity. There will never be any more SoftImage development.

Can’t happen to Blender. Blender will always be free and cross platform. Learn Blender and use it for life.

Given how Blender came into being (acquired a product facing an economic dead end), never say never. There could be other products out there barely breaking even for companies that could be rescued by foundations.

I guess in no less than 5-10 years, blender will become No.1 tool in 3D modeling world, much better than maya and 3ds max. I hope that day come!

Great move by unity, a lot of indie devs use blender since then can afford/use commercial 3D tools.

I might be wrong, but last I checked unity had drag-n-drop support for Blender models.

I use Unity's Blender integration extensively. It just invokes blender's CLI to convert .blend -> .fbx for you automatically, which is nice.

However, only very simple material properties are imported. Multi-textured objects, materials with specific BSDF properties, etc. are basically ignored entirely and you have to manually reproduce them in Unity after the fact. It's very annoying.

Perhaps with this news this is soon a thing of the past

It would be a good start if the Principled shader could be imported with some degree of fidelity. A lot can be done with just that one..

Can't happen without parity, or at least mapping between Unity and blender rendering engine.

Materials is complicated enough that they should probably not attempt to port. Unity ships with real time rendering features that blender doesn't have, so anyhow stuff will be fine in unity itself. It leaves blender plenty useful for mesh modeling, uv mapping, rigging and animation.

I'm not sure about that (unless something recently changed) - however it does have great support for the FBX format, which Blender imports and exports with absolutely zero issue for me, animations included.

An invaluable resource is Adobe's somehow free humanoid 3D animation suite, Mixamo. You can easily create your own T-Bone model of a 3D character of your own design and then import it to Mixamo for the coolest results.

Unity is probably the coolest and most irreplaceable/invaluable piece of software I use next to Apple's Logic Pro X. I love it.

Unity does support .blend files and has done so for the better part of a decade - however, it is implemented by the Unity editor invoking Blender to transparently convert the model from .blend to FBX. Here's a related page from the Unity documentation from 2013: https://docs.unity3d.com/410/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-Impo...

You can use Blender files in Unity directly without first exporting them as obj or fbx, but there may be some caveats. Like I'm pretty sure you still had to manually hook up textures and stuff last time I tried.

I think you get that with FBX but it's not a big deal since most time you create your own materials.

Yeah, true

While this might be a case of "commoditize your complement", it's also a great news for Blender which is by the day becoming a really solid offering in 3d. Remembering the weird but promising NaN versions (before being acquired by the community to open source it), this is great news.

I think Blender is already at to top when it comes to 3D, although it lacks the integration into professional creative pipelines/workflows.

Has blender made progress on their UV tools? Last time I used it, they were miles behind what Maya / 3ds Max offered and honestly, for me, that’s a part of the process i would prefer to be as smooth as possible.

At least there are open source add-ons for UV manipulation in active development:

https://github.com/nutti/Magic-UV

https://github.com/leukbaars/DreamUV

https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender

Incremental improvements are going into the core tools, though, just by looking at the user manual history: https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BM/history/trunk/ble...

The manual page: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/ed...

Like Nokia and Blackberry when the iPhone came out. Autodesk is about to pass into irrelevance as Blender becomes the tool of choice for developers. I've used 3ds Max and Maya professionally since the 90's, and while they still have more functionality, Blender is improving and becoming more functional with each release and is quickly coming up to par. I'd argue Blender has better UI and is more stable than those programs. The Blender community is fantastic as well.